Surely the first major casualty of Donald Trump’s landslide election victory, besides the Democrats, are pollsters.
His clean sweep of the seven battleground states; his lead over Kamala Harris with white women despite predictions of a political backlash over abortion rights (one pundit forecast “a Roe reckoning”); and his strong showing with the Latino and black communities effectively made a nonsense of the knife-edge race polls told us to expect.
As recently as last weekend polling guru J Ann Selzer gave Harris a three-point lead over Trump in the Republican-leaning state of Iowa. A loss in Iowa would “cut Trump’s path to victory off at the knees,” it was claimed.
As the final votes were counted in Iowa on Wednesday, Trump had a 13-point lead over Harris.
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At the same time as the Iowa poll, the respected New York Times/Siena College poll had Harris ahead of Trump in the key swing states of Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia with the two candidates tied in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The US polling industry has consistently underestimated the size of Trump’s voter base. It did so in 2016 and in 2020 and has acknowledged as much, vowing to use better samples. Several pollsters said they had changed how samples are weighted to make them more representative of the true share of Trump supporters.
Alas, to no avail. A seminal problem seems to be the fact that many Trump voters have seldom or never voted in the past. A quarter of the votes he garnered in 2020 were from people who had not voted in 2016. These voters and their preferences appear to have gone undetected once again.
Juxtaposed to this epic fail on the part of pollsters were the financial betting markets, which zeroed in on a likely Trump victory days, even weeks, in advance. Polymarket, one of the best known, gave Trump a 60 per cent chance of winning the day before the vote. Others had Trump at an even shorter price. It seems the old Watergate adage of “following the money” proved right in the end.
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